The Vestfold Hills are alive: characterising microbial and environmental dynamics in Old Wallow, eastern Antarctica

Old Wallow is an underexplored, hyper-arid coastal desert in Antarctica’s Vestfold Hills. Situated near an elephant seal wallow, we examined how stochastic nutrient inputs from the seal wallow affect soil communities amid environmental changes along a spatially explicit sampling transect. We hypothesized that nutrient levels would be elevated due to proximity to the seal wallow, influencing community distributions. While the soil bacterial and eukaryotic communities at the phylum level were similar to other terrestrial environments, analysis at class and family levels revealed a dominance of unclassified taxa that are often linked to marine environments. Elevated nutrient concentrations (NO3−, SO42−, SO3) were found at Old Wallow, with conductivity and Cl− levels up to 10-fold higher at the lowest elevation soils, correlating with significantly (p